<p>" can’t believe I am telling you people exactly what the problem is and I am getting feedback on Tiger mom. … If mom can’t help with the math a tutor will be hired immediately"</p>
<p>Was that so hard? That’s all I was asking! I thought you were suggesting that all Asian moms were good at advanced math, and that non Asian FAFSA were better at math than their wives. FWIW, my D that I could no longer help with math went on to BE the tutor. D STILL thinks she’s no good at math, but ( I hope) she knows that is relatively (to her college classmates) speaking. I guess I shouldn’t admit this, but the kids at her school of engineering are SCARY,</p>
<p>I will admit that I had no idea how por their school was in math until they started to compete with kids in college.</p>
<p>I wonder how much this phenomenon contributes to the threads that proliferate every fall on CC: “My 4.0/2250 kid is failing his/her freshman science/math weeder course.” That 4.0/2250 kid may have been successful in high school at memorization and echoing, whereas in college they need to study for mastery and understanding. Perhaps if colleges did a better job of helping students understand what it takes to be successful in college-level STEM courses (as crizello suggests upthread), there would be fewer dropouts.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If my D’s math and science magnet is typical, not only do these high schools offer advanced courses - but they also emphasize mastery and understanding, not just memorization and echoing. I think it is that emphasis that prepares students for the expectations of college-level STEM courses.</p>
<p>Every time I see the word “memorization” in the same sentence as engineering, I cringe. </p>
<p>The whole point of much of engineering is to build abstractions that hide details of a lower level of abstraction and teach you how to solve canonical problems. Then you take the solution of the canonical problem and apply it to the problem you actually have. </p>
<p>The whole reason the whole concept of abstraction was developed was to RELIEVE the human mind of the burden of memorizing too many things at once so they can focus on the most germane elements. </p>
<p>If you find yourself memorizing or know anyone memorizing anything in an engineering class, you’re doing it wrong and you’re not really understanding the main point. You need to look at a bigger picture and see that what your working on is one of a set of techniques that solve a canonical problem and understand those techniques so that you can apply it to your problem.</p>
<p>*Elemetary school teachers aren’t required to take enough math in college. Many of them hate math and barely got through college algebra and these are the people teaching your kids fractions! That right there is THE problem. *</p>
<p>that’s why it was embarrassing and hushed when that study came out that El-Ed majors on college campuses typically had the lowest SAT scores of the school. This country does have too many teachers who were basically B/C students throughout their own school years.</p>
<p>The linked article suggests that is not the principal problem:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Then there’s this:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Perhaps this suggests that “even well-qualified students” who aspire to STEM careers would be better served by going to less-selective schools than their stats would otherwise qualify them.</p>
<p>IOW, perhaps the student who could get into Michigan should instead go to Michigan Tech; or to WPI instead of MIT; or a CSU instead of Berkeley; or a UW-Platteville instead of UW-Madison; or a Bradley instead of Northwestern; or NIU instead of UIUC; or Penn State instead of CMU; etc.</p>
<p>I realize this is, of course, anathema to the prestige-obsessed parents who think that USNWR is Holy Writ and who tend to dominate the posts on this site - so flame away!</p>
<p>I also think that this is part of the problem of why people give up on engineering. I’m a TA for my school’s Intro to Computer Science class and what I’ve noticed with a lot of students is that they think memorization is enough to get you through the class. But at least for CompSci (I’m not very familiar with other STEM majors), memorization will barely let you scratch the surface of the material you need to complete the first week’s lab assignments.</p>
<p>This is all anecdotal, but I sort of went in the opposite direction of the pattern described in this article. I started out as a History major, but after taking a CompSci course I found it more challenging in a way that made it more interesting and more exciting.</p>
<p>But since I never had the opportunity to take a CompSci class in HS, I’ve had to put in a lot of extra work outside of my courses to catch up with my classmates (and the stereotype that Computer Science majors have all been hacking databases since they were 8). I can definitely see how the psychological impact of feeling underprepared or under qualified compared to your peers (and usually being one if the only females in your classes) can drive people out of a subject, unless you have a really strong underlying motivation to keep you going.</p>
<p>Especially when you consider that the single most important factor in a student’s success is the quality of the teaching, far more than family background or dollars spent per student.</p>
<p>Last spring, I had an opportunity to observe a second grade classroom in one of the schools I cover as a reporter. I was appalled. The teacher was presenting a math lesson, doing problems on the board to demonstrate how to solve a particular type of problem. About a third of the students were clearly paying no attention, yet the teacher droned on, oblivious to the fact that she was basically wasting her time. Two boys spent the entire session squabbling over who would get to use the pencil sharpener first - again, without any intervention by the teacher.</p>
<p>And get this - this was a fairly new teacher who had been identified to me by the district superintendent as one of the rising stars among the younger faculty.</p>
<p>As long as we have people like this teaching our kids, all the money, races to somewhere, or NCLBs are not going to solve our education problems.</p>
<p>*Two boys spent the entire session squabbling over who would get to use the pencil sharpener first - again, without any intervention by the teacher.
*</p>
<p>And that’s another thing…all this talking that is permitted in the classroom while the teacher is teaching! When my kids were younger, I would substitute teach at the local K-6. It was an eye-opener. Kids would talk wherever they wanted. When the principal or secretary would speak over the intercom, the students had not been trained to be immediately quiet so that the announcement could be heard. There was no discipline in the classroom at all. None. </p>
<p>There needs to be some ol’ Sister Mary Hell-on-Wheels in more than a few classrooms these days. (and I don’t mean corporal punishment, just some discipline)</p>
<p>Actually, the other critical factor I’ve often heard cited by HS classmates and friends in STEM fields was the inability or unwillingness to put in the requisite amount of effort necessary to succeed in a STEM major. Saw plenty of this firsthand in the two intro CS programming courses for majors I took. </p>
<p>This is one area high schools with LCD style teaching do the most disservice to their students as it lulls even the top students into a false sense of security which bites them once they hit college…especially in STEM fields. </p>
<p>My high school classmates and I saw far too many otherwise A/A+ high stat kids who struggled or even crashed & burned because they were floored by the exponential increase in the workload and rigor. </p>
<p>In contrast, good rigorous private and public schools which have high expectations, teachers who don’t cater to the LCD, and provide heavy rigorous workloads as a matter of course have students who had much smoother transitions to college academics from the start of their first semester.</p>
<p>Just so you know, I have a MLS degree from U.S., BLS (Library Science) from china. Every night, I sit with my 8th grade son and go over his Geometry homework. At the beginning of the school year, I also helped my daughter a little bit (she has pre-cal this year). Once she had a question that I couldn’t figure out, I called my mother who is 70+ years old, retired Electronic Engineer (the actual electricity stuff), and she figured the answer in about 5 minutes. </p>
<p>If you ask my kids, they know that Mom is good in math and Grandma is even better in math.</p>
<p>The interest thing is, I never considered myself as strong in math until I check my kids’ math homework. On the other hand, my mother is always proud of the math genes in her family.</p>
<p>There are, however, confounding factors. Many of the CSUs attract a more pre-professional oriented student body than Berkeley does; such students may be more likely to stay in more obviously pre-professional majors like business, journalism, engineering, nursing, visual and performing arts, etc. as long as they pass (as in C or higher grades). Meanwhile, Berkeley students who got straight A grades in high school may think that getting a B grade is a “failure”.</p>
<p>CSUs (especially the more selective ones) are also generally harder to change majors in, since they tend to admit by major even in the liberal arts/science divisions (and, unlike in many UCs, the engineering majors are often not the most selective majors).</p>
<p>Also, the low selectivity CSUs tend to have fewer engineering and CS majors to begin with, perhaps suggesting that the “difficult” reputation of engineering and CS scares away CSU students from those majors before the enter, unlike at Berkeley, where many straight-A-in-high-school students overconfidently enter those majors and then find that college math, physics, and CS is much more difficult than their high schools’ math and physics.</p>
<p>When my kids were younger, we had tried the Kumon program as it was highly recommended by some friends. It was basically repetitive math, do the same problem in a 100 different ways till the child knows it cold. My kids dropped out fairly quickly, but the sales pitch was that it was the way math was taught in Japan and other countries and that is why those countries became so successful. </p>
<p>Again, discounting the sales pitch, do we need to rethink how we teach math and science in schools. If engineering requires knowing how to understand and use equations, should that be a skill that is developed earlier. Again my kids never bought in the Kumon concept, but is that what is lacking in our education system.</p>
<p>Again, I do not know the answer but a lot of the discussion in this thread is about teachers and the strength of the curriculum (AP etc.). Should there also be a discussion on teaching style, is there a method of teaching math and science that will not only give the child a stronger foundation but also inculcate an love for math and science?</p>
<p>^^ DS was never allowed to move ahead in math in elementary school as he could not get 100 8x6=? math fact questions done in 3 minutes. Now as an 18 year old, he’s taking Honors Real Analysis at a top tier research U and ‘getting’ it.</p>
<p>I’m glad he’s made it to where he is, but sad he never had any help along the way from the schools. In fact, there were times when I felt they were downright obstructionist as they seemed to think that if he needed more than what they were providing, then that was a slap in their face. When he decided to self study for Calc BC and asked the Calc AB teacher for his thoughts, the teacher basically said ‘good luck to you’ and offered not one iota of help. He ended up being the only kid in the entire city (>1000 HS grad/year) that took the Calc BC test. Got a 5, never got a ‘good job’ from anyone at school.</p>
<p>Regarding the education of K-12 teachers: S2’s large university offers 3 degrees for math/physics. BS, BA or BA for future teachers. S1’s small LAC requires everyone to take physics with lab except for future teachers - they take no lab “Physics for Future Presidents”. Is it time for 9-12 teachers to specialize?</p>
<p>Regarding Kumon - I did it from 3rd/4th grade until 9th grade. I always say the most useful thing I learned was the quadratic formula. It isn’t the best teaching method as their explanations aren’t useful, and by the more difficult algebra, its not interesting, worth it, or effective to just do examples over and over again. The theoretical methods I learned in school was much better.</p>
<p>However, there are kids who don’t know how to do basic functions or algebra effectively or mentally in high school. That is just bad. Kumon (or any workbook/parent/whatever) taught me that at least. You need to know your essentials in your sleep before getting to and doing well in more advanced stuff, like AP Calc, which I’m in now.</p>
<p>Also, the trick is not to quit, or to do well enough fast enough that you passed the levels fairly quickly.</p>
<p>Why do STEM majors change their minds so much? Okay, where’s the punch line? Because they have developed the technology to do so? Because of the ill effects of Vulcan mind-melds?</p>
<p>Why are there so many posts on this thread that focus solely on the physical sciences. Biology is part of STEM, and all it takes to do well in biology is “all the memorization in the world”.</p>
<p>If math weakness may be related to not doing well in the physical sciences, what rationale do y’all have for Bio?</p>
<p>It does seem that huge numbers of students graduate with biology degrees. Nationally, it appears that biology graduates are about as numerous as all engineering graduates put together in recent years’ graduating classes.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there may still be attrition among intended biology majors, because many may be doing that with the intention of being pre-med (even though one can do pre-med with any major). Once such a student gets a grade less than an A- (i.e. “pre-med failure”), s/he may drop the pre-med idea and the biology major with it.</p>
<p>Definitely, which is my premise: it’s the rigor and competition (curves) which force kids to choose “easier” majors. The real question, IMO, is why to STEM faculty feel the need to weed kids out of science professional schools? Why do not other college faculty do the same for pre-law types?</p>
(and I don’t mean corporal punishment, just some discipline)</p>